illustrator

I am an archaeology undergraduate at the University of Central Lancashire (Uclan). I have been engaged as an intern to help create a database of past excavations for a 10 year project starting in September. The project site is a Roman fort (Bremetenacum Veteranorum) amidst the beautiful village of Ribchester in Lancashire and its surrounding area. The project intends to look at not only the fort but how it affected the local population and landscape and at what happened after the Romans ‘left’.

My internship began by sourcing any and all publications produced over the last couple of centuries that had any archaeological information about Ribchester. The internet proved a valuable tool for this purpose but still it took days longer than I intended and I haven’t even gone to collect the material yet.

The remainder of my time has been processing information gathered from a small trench we excavated last September and some test pits done over the spring. This includes transferring the section drawings of the excavations into GIS software via Adobe Illustrator. This should help us to better pin point future excavations. This was then followed by inputting the context sheets.

What remains for me to do now is to sort through the finds and catalogue them for future reference. Identifying pottery seems to take a great deal of time. It is a process that is both enjoyable and frustrating at the same time. I am unsure whether I would want to specialize in pottery, to just become good at it or simply find my own intern to deal with it. At the moment I will stick to just trying to become good at it.

The process will start over again when the publications I sourced earlier arrive. Once all the past excavation are consolidated we and future archaeologists, should have a fantastic source of information with which to help us decipher of ‘just what was going on’ in Ribchester when the Romans were here.

I was meant to be working on site today; at less than an hour’s drive up the road it would have made a pleasant change from working several hours’ drive away, but the site start date has slipped. It’s a fairly common occurrence and can happen for any number of reasons, sometimes down to delays in planning permission or due to other construction work, the client’s cash flow, or sometimes just the weather. Sometimes sites go into apparent hibernation and only resurface months or even years down the line, when suddenly you get a call or an email saying that ‘the footings are being pulled next week, where are you’!

On this occasion it is due to planning control and not yet having the Written Scheme of Investigation signed off –this is the document that says what we will do on site (and afterwards), and how we will dig and record it, and it has to be approved by the local Planning Archaeologist within the relevant local authority. Ours is still in limbo, so the site can’t start.

Managing the flow of work is never easy, and is part of the reason why site staff contracts are often short, and not extended until the last minute –no-one knows if the work will be there on Monday. When you are a sole trader it gets harder –you either need to be able to clone yourself to deal with a glut of work, or find something to fill the hours when a job slides. It is almost always outside your control, and sometimes there seems to be little that can be done to mitigate the problem.

My freelance work is luckily not restricted to site work –I’m also an illustrator, create training materials, do grant-funded research and I carry out post-excavation and publication work on various archaeological projects. All this work often has slightly less demanding deadlines than the fieldwork -it has to be done, but the deadline is usually ‘tomorrow’, rather than ‘yesterday’. So having a mix of different types of projects gives me the flexibility to be able to deal with last minute delays to sites. Picking up and putting down projects every few days isn’t the most efficient way of working, but sometimes you have to do it: its a juggling act.

Day to day the juggling of current jobs is usually ok, and you do get the occasional day off to counterbalance the runs of 18 hour days required to meet deadlines. The bigger impact of slippage is in tendering for future work as it may take a month or longer for sites or PX programmes to go live, and all the time all your jobs are slipping, being brought forward, and morphing from one day watching briefs into three week excavations. The Year Planner starts to look like 4-D Tetris, and its often only at the last moment that it all comes together.

So today, instead of digging a late prehistoric/Roman and medieval site next to a pub in the Cotswolds, I am finalising the report on a project I did in Nepal earlier in the year…

First off I should say that I always find it quite uneasy calling myself an Illustrator. To me illustrator conjurs up images of amazing artefact and reconstruction drawings; I am not one of those, I deal with plans, sections, maps using CAD, GIS and Adobe Illustrator, as well as carrying out graphic design and web design.

Today I have three main tasks to deal with:

1. Carry out edits to the illustrations for a site that AOC excavated a while ago, and is now ready to be published.
2. Finish designing a pair of interpretation boards that will eventually be placed by a Neolithic cairn.
3. Produce some maps using GIS for our York office so that they have them ready for carrying out a heritage assessment

On top of this I normally have lots of small tasks given to me over the course of a working day. These can be to place a news item on our website and then tweet a link to all of our followers, to design & produce a trenching plan for evaluations, to edit/enhance photographs, to PDF documents ready to be sent to clients (my machine is one of the few capable of producing PDFs) and so on.

7:15 I’m in the office, cup of tea made as the computer boots up and logs in. Straight away there’s an email asking me to produce some plates for an HBR report. A small job that will only take 10-15 minutes. Time to load up InDesign and make some plates!

I’m an archaeologist living and working in Japan. I’m a researcher of Meiji University Archaeological Investigation Unit. This unit is organized for preventive excavation within university campus.

In Japan, all archaeological sites are conserved under the national law. Local governments develop a registration map of archaeological sites and check all land development. In order to keep to the law, all developer and constructor – not only commercial sector but also public/administrative sector- must make an effort to conserve archaeological sites within their development/ construction area. If they cannot change their plans, they must do excavation. More than 95% of excavations carried out in Japan are this type – preventive excavation…documentation before destruction of sites for those 40yrs.

As you know Japan has large population- about 120 million- in small land. Most parts of our landscape are hilly or mountainous, so our living spaces are definitely limited and overlaid on ancestor’s lived space. This is the cause of so many excavations – more than 8,000 in average/year and the peak was about 12,000 in 1996…- have done every year.

In 2004, our project was started. It was for the construction of new buildings of the university affiliated junior-high and high school. At first we did survey and sounding in total 40,000 sq-meters area, then begun excavation in 18,000 sq-meters area. The excavation continued for 2 years and 5 months – more than 800 days. We unveiled Modern Age (including Imperial Japanese Army and occupation Allied Force sites during WWII ), Jomon Age (mostly Middle Jomon, 6-4.5ka) and the Upper Palaeolithic Age (32-16ka). Now I’m constructing web-site for our excavation (https://sites.google.com/site/japarchresources/ :it’s not completed) .

aerial view of our excavation area in 2005

excavation of the Upper Palaeolithic living floor

excavation of a shelter for air fighter of Imperial Japanese Army during WWII

documentation of the Late Pleistocene staratigraphy

Our excavation was finished in Dec,2007. However it means finishing just the first step only in the field… we have more than 500 containers filled with artefacts such as: 5,000 potsherd and 40,000 pebbles of Jomon, 25,000 lithics and 90,000 pebbles of the Upper Palaeolithic, more than 200GB of digital images and measurement datum by total station system… and so on.

Since 2008, we’re engaging with the post-excavation procedure and it will continue until 2015. We have published the 1st volume of our excavation report this May and will publish other 5 volumes over 5 years.

This is our background. And here I show our habitual day in post-excavation laboratory of our investigation unit. Now we’re tackling with Jomon and the Upper Palaeolithic materials.

The first section is for Upper Palaeolithic pebble refitting work. We uncovered more than 300 stone heaps composed with 90,000 pebbles. Most of pebbles are burnt and fragments. These stone heaps are assumed for cooking, as in the Pacific ethnography.

This work has started in 2010 and will continue for the next 2 years. There are many pebbles in containers waiting for their turn…

Upper Palaeolithic pebble refitting

Upper Palaeolithic pebble refitting(2)

These workers are from the commercial company engaging in preventive archaeology.

more pebbles are waiting their turn...

all containers are fulfilled with material

The second section is for Upper Palaeolithic stone tools (lithic technology) refitting. This work has started in 2007 and will finished this year.

Basically we start from distinguishing chipped stone tools and debitages into petrological classification and making sub-divisions acording to their colour, texture, micro-structure and other characteristics. This is very empiric but very efficient method. Up to now we have documented more than 6,000 cases of refitting in 25,000 specimens of lithic material. In some cases, we can reconstruct original shape of nodule and decode total sequence of knapping technology. Of course, to determine source of raw material, we apply archaeo-scientific analysis.

Lithic refitting work(1)

Lithic refitting work(2)

arrange debitages with raw material, texture and other character

documenting which pieces are and how they are refitting in sequence

The third section is computer application for managing the database, drawing maps and artefacts, geo-spatial analysing and editing publications. We use Microsoft(R) Access(2007)(R) for database managing; Inteli CAD(6.0J) for arranging and original drawings measurement survey datum, 3-dimensional distribution maps of artefacts; Adobe(R) Illustrator(CS5)(R) for drawing artefacts and finising maps and other figures for publication; Arc GIS<sup>(R)</sup>10 for geo-spatial analysing; Adobe(R) InDesign(CS4)(R) for editing publications. Some part of these computer works are put out to commercial companies, those which have specific technique and systems.

computers in our laboratory

a drawing of stone tool (Upper Palaeolithic backed blade)

drawing distribution map of Upper Palaeolithic lithic concentration

database for chipped stone tools of Upper Palaeolithic

geo-spatial analysing of Jomon inter-site components

Post-excavation laboratory working continues…however I hope to go back to the field…yep I should!!!!

My name is Glenn Hustler. I am an illustrator based in Bradford, U.K. I’ve always had an interest in historical matter. A couple of my un-commisioned projects include an illustrated story of the First Crusade, in which I married a number of events during the Crusade to the reported words of the Pope who called for it to happen, and a fictional diary of a WWI soldier complete with illustrations.

After I graduated I met Patrick Hadley, an archaeologist interested in public understanding of the past. He introduced me to the idea that there is a need for a new approach in the visual depiction of human prehistory. The problem being that current illustration of this kind provides a deceptively complete picture of what is known, which means it’s audience generally doesn’t feel the need to question it.

Together, we have founded a non-profit company advocating this approach. Enkyad Heritage Media brings artists (visual, music, dance) and archaeologists together to help bring the past to life. We have written and storyboarded a short animation set in the Mesolithic, which contains many self-contradictions in it’s presentation. Once finished we plan to take the animation to art galleries and history museums. The hope is that by encouraging an open questioning of the material we present, we can build interest in the subject by allowing people to pursue their own lines of enquiry.

Other opportunities to produce work related to the subject of archaeology have come through Patrick. I provided work for the northern hunter gatherer forum, last year I met Dave Farnell, editor of the archaeological journal, The Post Hole, for which I have produced covers, and most recently I had my logo accepted for the day of archaeology!

The brief was very helpful. It was clear the logo had to be bold, bright and punchy but clearly be archaeological, so I layered some earthy colours in the text while trying to keep them bright and cheerful. While sketching out ideas I played around with the concept of using broken or partly hidden text, in order to create a puzzle to be solved and there is an element of that in the top line.